Let’s begin with a simple question: would you start a new business without a physical address? Aside from the fact it’s not legal, the question itself is preposterous. What sort of business doesn’t have a mailing address? Similarly, you wouldn’t start a business without a dedicated business phone line; after all, how are people going to contact you?
If you found the above scenarios ridiculous, that’s a good sign: it means you understand a little bit about the business world. But what if I posed this question: would you run a business without a company website? That question is actually just as preposterous as the ones I started with. In today’s technology and internet-dominated world, it would be madness not to have a website for your business. Even small-town thrift stores have websites these days.
But it’s not enough to merely have a website for your business anymore. If you really want to bolster your sales and see your revenue grow, you need a website designed to drive sales. And the best way to accomplish this is to design your site to fit an inbound marketing strategy.
Inbound marketing is all about bringing customers to you. Through the use of keyword-laden content, you attract potential customers to your website after they search the web for information related to your products/services. Even if you already have a website for your business, that website needs to be modified to cater to the needs of inbound marketing. How can you accomplish this? Follow these four steps to get started:
Get an expert
Whether you need to hire a web designer or have someone on staff who can do the job, you need access to a professional with web design expertise. There’s a lot of coding and tinkering that has to take place, and it’s fine if you don’t know how to do it; but you better get somebody who does.
Start creating content
You’re going to need plenty of content to fill up your site once it’s up and running, so that process should begin before the new site goes live. Inbound marketing relies heavily on blogs to attract customers, and you’ll want to post new blog articles at least 2-3 times per week. Your blog articles should be on topics that are important in your field/market, because they need to be of high relevance to your potential customers.
Prioritize function over form
Your website should look nice, but you’re not trying to win any design awards. Never forget that your website has one job above all others: to drive sales. Therefore, your site should be designed in a way that makes it incredibly simple for visitors to become leads.
With inbound marketing, you’re going to use content offers to make this happen. Content offers are things such as white papers, eBooks and infographics; detailed, informative pieces that provide value to your visitors. They need to be valuable enough that your visitors will provide contact information in exchange for an offer. If your offers are good, this is an easy decision for the visitor to make; providing contact info costs them nothing. But what they’ve actually done is willingly become a lead for your business.
You should emphasize your content offers heavily, and always ensure your visitors are just a click away from that contact info/offer exchange. The last thing you want is for a customer to be confused about how to become a lead.
Keep the pressure low
Because inbound marketing focuses on attracting customers to your site, the emphasis is on providing value instead of pushing for sales. Therefore, don’t use pressure techniques to generate leads; instead, highlight the value and expertise your site brings. Use wording on your site that emphasizes how you can help customers and what they stand to gain from your products/services. Converting the lead is something for the sales team to worry about; from a marketing standpoint, you want the customer to feel good about your business and view it as a credible source.
This is just a brief rundown to help get you started. If you’d like to learn more about how to implement your own inbound marketing strategy into your website, download our free eBook:
Topics: Inbound Marketing
